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Mr. Fisher: I am grateful for the opportunity to speak to new clause 3, which stands in my name and those of my colleagues. I was emboldened to table the new clause, which is similar to an amendment that I moved in Committee, because, at that stage, the Under-Secretary, my hon. Friend the Member for North Warwickshire (Mr. O'Brien), said that he thought that the amendment was a good idea and he was sympathetic to its concept. However, he rejected it because he thought that, in spite of being a good idea, it would make bad law. I invited my hon. Friend to find out whether he could turn what he agreed was a good concept into decent law, and I am not sure whether he has been able to take up that challenge. When my hon. Friend the Parliamentary Secretary replies to the debate, we will find out whether he agrees with his ministerial colleague that the idea would make bad law.
There is an important concept behind the new clause, which follows from our previous debate about a purposes clause. The duty to assist in the new clause is aimed to help with the Bill's implementation. In our previous debate, hon. Members on both sides of the House agreed that the Bill was breaking new legislative ground and would require a new culture to be engendered throughout government and public authorities, and that it would try to promote a new culture of confidence, curiosity and self-empowerment among people. The new clause is particularly directed at individuals.
The Bill addresses different problems; it empowers individuals to gain control of their lives by finding out what information about them is held by public authorities. At the moment, they do not have the right of access to that information, and the lack of information often leads to enormous problems in their lives. The inhibition of not knowing the state of one's health and what is on one's medical records can curdle one's whole life.
When I introduced the Right to Know Bill nine years ago, people throughout the country wrote to me with specific, tragic stories of having been denied access to their medical records. A woman had been under a misapprehension about her health because of a conspiracy between her general practitioner and her husband. They had the well-intentioned aim of protecting her from knowing about the state of her health but, for 10 years, she had been denied the knowledge of her medical condition and how she could deal with it. When she gained access to that information, her whole life changed, and she was able to view her condition and her life in a different context.
The help that this Bill can give to individuals is very important, but it will be realised only if people genuinely have access to information and can make the legislation
work. All hon. Members know how complicated is the wording of Acts of Parliament, and the lawyers who advise companies, Departments and public authorities have difficulty enough interpreting the law, but individuals will find the Bill particularly unfriendly and difficult to understand. That is in the nature of legislation, so we should be doing everything that we can to make the Bill user-friendly and open.
Even if the Minister is not able to accept the new clause, I hope that he will today announce a commitment by the Government to put new resources into promoting it. Whatever form the Bill takes when it finally gets into statute, we should be proud of many aspects of it, and we need to promote it and make sure that people understand its aims and what it can do to change their lives and their grasp of their future. We must make it as easy as we can for them to realise the goods that could flow from the Bill.
I hope that the Minister will announce a programme similar to the one with which the previous Government backed their charter mark. They were very proud of that and put resources into advertising it. We need exactly that commitment from our Government to promote the Bill.
Mr. Hawkins:
On behalf of my right hon. Friend the Member for Huntingdon (Mr. Major), the former Prime Minister, I greatly appreciate the hon. Gentleman's genuine tribute to my right hon. Friend's citizens charter. I recognise the importance of the hon. Gentleman's points.
Mr. Fisher:
I live in hope that, when the Minister replies, there will have been a Pauline conversion on the road to the Report stage, but I am not holding my breath.
The Government have both a duty and an opportunity to promote the Bill. Placing a duty on the large number of public authorities, Government Departments and local government departments that are covered in the Bill to assist the applicant, is the least that we can do. It is the most sensible thing that we can do to ensure that the good things in the Bill are available to individuals. Throughout the Committee stage, the Minister was at great pains to say that we must make the Bill practicable. He is right, but one of the ways to make the Bill practicable for individuals is to include a duty to assist. It is partly a matter of the attitude of those authorities, but it also has to do with some specific problems in the Bill. There are many hoops to be gone through and barriers to be climbed before we give people the information that they want.
Mr. Bercow:
Despite the hon. Gentleman's persistence and the eloquence of his advocacy over a long period, does he agree that a relatively small proportion of people
Mr. Fisher:
I agree. The subject has not yet grabbed the imagination of people. We do not have a curious, demanding culture in this country. Colleagues on both sides of the House who travel to the United States will know that the attitude of individuals there is to ask, "Why not?" They ask questions and are aggressive towards the state and authority. They demand their rights. There is no such attitude here. It is something in the water supply or, perhaps, in our culture--our zeitgeist. We do not have such an aggressive attitude towards life.
By being much more passive and quiescent about the problems of the state, our citizens are denied their rights. The Bill seeks to address that, but the hon. Gentleman is right. I have had hardly a letter on the subject in 10 years. In fact, in 17 years in the House, I have hardly had a letter on it. It has not caught the public imagination, which is not to say that it is not important.
To look at the matter in a different way, many specific pieces of legislation on information in local government and medical records were passed under the last Conservative Government. They have not been grasped and taken up by individuals. That does not mean that they are not important. It just puts greater onus on us to make the Freedom of Information Bill, which is the parent of all those Acts and brings them together, work; to learn the lessons at last of why the other Acts have not been taken up by people, as they should have been; and to ensure that the Bill is taken up.
As I said in my previous contribution, the general tone of the Bill is grudging and reluctant. That is not just rhetoric. It contains specific barriers. Clause 1(3) entitles a public authority legally to turn down an inadequately identified request.
Many requests for information are by people who are learning how to use legislation. They will not be adequately identified. People will not always know how to be clever enough to phrase their request in the right terms, but that does not mean that the request is not valid. The information might be available to them, but the clause allows authorities to turn the request down. Far from being given a duty to assist, they have an opportunity to refuse.
Clause 7(1)(a) and (b) allow requests to be rejected if they are made orally, or if a correspondence address is not given. Those seem nitpicking reasons to turn down an otherwise valid application. The whole tone is against the applicant, rather than for him.
Clause 11 deals with cost. No cost is given or defined, yet if an applicant makes a request that will cost more than the Bill eventually determines, that will allow the authority to turn it down.
Under clause 15, a body from which information is sought is under no obligation to inform applicants of their right to appeal. Clause 50 allows requests to be rejected if an applicant is slow to complain, or suffered because of undue delay. Those are all specific things in the Bill that make it more difficult, rather than easier, for applicants to access information.
Given that those things remain in the Bill, surely they need to be balanced--I return to the Minister's earlier statement--by a duty to assist, so that, when authorities are presented with an application for information, they must be positive. They must go with the spirit of the application and help the applicant to get the application in order, if they possibly can.
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